Screen Capture for Data Collection - Dan Tran and Dan Angus
Screen Capture for Data Collection
Dan Tran & Daniel Angus
Dan Tran and Daniel Angus (Australian Internet Observatory) show why screen capture matters for studying what people actually see on their devices, and how it compares ethically with web scraping. The session combines a talk on on-device recording pipelines, a hands-on installation of the Mobile Ad Toolkit app, and a technical deep-dive into ad detection, deduplication, and reconstructing ads from network traffic, plus the realities of maintaining research instrumentation against constant platform change.
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction and speaker handover
2:01 Why mobile screen capture?
5:27 Building an Android capture app
9:59 The challenge: a stream of images
12:58 Cloud vs on-device processing
22:21 Detecting ads with YOLO and OCR
29:12 Hands-on: installing the Mobile Ad Toolkit
32:28 Debrief: inside the capture pipeline
38:10 Matching ads to the ad library
44:06 Researcher dashboard demo
47:14 Participant dashboards and data quality
56:41 Audience questions and discussion
Textual materials: https://internetobservatory.org.au/tr...
Recorded at SICSS Melbourne 2026 (Summer Institute in Computational Social Science).
Program: https://sicss.io/2026/melbourne/schedule
Hosted by the Australian Internet Observatory and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society at RMIT University - Activator Venue.